In the blog post, Izrailevsky said the cloud move took as long as it did because shifting Netflix’s infrastructure off-premise took a lot of hard work and required the company to make some “difficult choices”.

The firm had to completely rewrite a lot of its processes and applications so they would run natively in the cloud. It also had to change the way its teams operate, so they could adopt a continuous delivery strategy for new software code.

“Many new systems had to be built, and new skills learned,” he said. “It took time and effort to transform Netflix into a cloud-native company, but it put us in a much better position to continue to grow and become a global TV network.”

Outages were a common occurrence when operating its own datacentres, and do still occur in the cloud, he admitted, but the move off-premise has resulted in greater reliability overall.

“Failures are unavoidable in any large-scale distributed system, including a cloud-based one,” he said. “However, the cloud allows you to build highly reliable services out of fundamentally unreliable but redundant components.

“By incorporating the principles of redundancy and graceful degradation in our architecture, and being disciplined about regular production drills using Simian Army, it is possible to survive failures in the cloud infrastructure and within our own systems without impacting the member experience.”

The move to cloud has also enabled the company to cut costs, said Izrailevsky, which he described as more of a side benefit to the move.

“This is possible due to the elasticity of the cloud, enabling us to continuously optimise instance type mix and to grow and shrink our footprint near-instantaneously without the need to maintain large capacity buffers,” he said. “We can also benefit from the economies of scale that are only possible in a large cloud ecosystem.”

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Instead of all the articles about 100% data-center free, I'd like to see how they handle their backend credit-card and compliance systems in AWS. I've actually read some back-channel talk that some of those systems get moved to Oracle's Cloud. Would like to hear more details there.